


Cysylltiad

by Kainosite



Category: Owl Service - Alan Garner
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: For nine years, Roger has been trying to make sense of what happened in the valley alone.  But when he unexpectedly runs into Gwyn in London, he's presented with the chance to gain an ally in his struggle and maybe something more.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Syksy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syksy/gifts).



> With deep gratitude to J, best and swiftest of betas.

He spots Gwyn in Westminster on a drizzly day in April, trying to maneuver around a milling crowd of German tourists.

It will be funny later, because that was always Gwyn’s trouble, tourists, but at the time it’s the incongruity that strikes him. This is not Wales, this London street with its crowded pavements and its grand government buildings in white marble is about as not-Wales as it is possible for a place to be, and yet here, unmistakably, is Gwyn. Roger recognizes him instantly – the dark tousled hair over an oval face, the blue eyes under fierce brows, their color so intense that it is visible even in the dim grey light from across an intersection. They’ve not seen each other for going on nine years, not since that summer, but he knows.

For a moment the sense of displacement transfixes him. He stops in the middle of the pavement and someone jostles him from behind. Then a bus passes between them, breaking their eye contact, and he recovers enough to call out “Gwyn!” Gwyn is still attempting to navigate the Germans, who have unfolded a map and are trying to read it beneath their umbrellas, so Roger calls out again, a bit louder, “Gwyn–”

He dredges his memory for Gwyn’s surname and comes up empty-handed. Either he’s forgotten it or he never knew it, which would be a bit embarrassing with all of them living together in the same house for two weeks. Even if Gwyn was just the housekeeper’s boy, you’d think he would have learned it. Well, what was Gwyn’s mother’s name, then? Roger feels something catch this time, tugs at the thread of memory. The word ‘Nancy’ bobs unhelpfully to the surface.

It doesn’t matter, because this time Gwyn hears him. He stops short and stands marooned on the far side of the street while the light changes and the Germans flow and eddy around him. Roger crosses and comes over to him, holding out his hand to shake.

Gwyn hesitates. For a second Roger thinks he might not remember him, a thought that he finds unexpectedly and inexplicably devastating. But then Gwyn raises an eyebrow and takes his hand.

“Well, well. Roger Bradley.”

There’s still a lot of Welsh in his accent: a little more refined now, but the lilt is unmistakeable. The elocution records did no good, then, or maybe he threw them away.

“What brings you here?” Gwyn asks, as if Roger is the interloper who has cropped up in an entirely unexpected place.

“Meeting with the Ministry of Defense. What– what are you–?”

“Oh, I work here.” Gwyn nods at the Houses of Parliament across the road.

Roger glances incredulously between man and building. Now that he’s looking for it he can see that Gwyn is wearing a suit and tie under his coat, and the tie is not a particularly nice tie but neither is it noticeably polyester. But the coat over it is pretty ratty at the edges, and anyway Gwyn is Alison’s age, isn’t he? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? He can’t have been elected to Parliament, not even in Wales– Gwyn guesses what he’s thinking and laughs.

“As a _researcher_.”

“Oh.”

“Fancy meeting you here. Roger Bradley.” He shakes his head, amused. “Are you in London long?”

“I live here. We’ve opened a branch office.”

There’s no reply to this, which is fair enough really, unless Gwyn has discovered a sudden burning interest in molybdenum alloys. Still, not exactly friendly. Not that they ever were.

Roger would leave it there, except that he and Alison never talk about what happened. They’ll dance around it, “Do you remember that summer in Wales?” “Oh yes, that time I got sick,” but when Roger tries to push it further she blanks him. Or maybe she doesn’t know. She was so ill afterwards he’s never been quite sure how much she remembers, and it seems cruel to press her, so he doesn’t. But that’s left him alone with it, these nine years.

There’s no one else in the world he can talk to about it, no one but Gwyn. And here he is, appearing out of nowhere like a ghost. It would be a crying shame to miss this chance.

“Do you want to go for a drink sometime?”

Gwyn’s eyes narrow thoughtfully, but he takes this offer in the same light he’s taken Roger, guarded but not hostile. After a moment he nods.

“I can’t tonight, there’s a finance debate on. How about Friday? Where’s this new office of yours?”

“Whitechapel.”

“Everything is overpriced round here, but there are some decent pubs up by Leicester Square. We could meet there around six?”

Not his local then, or Roger’s. Neutral ground.

“Friday,” Roger says. He stands on the street corner in the rain and watches Gwyn walk down Whitehall until his dark head disappears into the crowd.

* * *

It’s three days until their planned meeting, enough time for second thoughts. It’s not as though they actually liked each other, he and Gwyn. It’s not as though they were capable of being civil to one another for more than about half an hour at a time, even before everything went awry. In the shock of seeing Gwyn again for the first time in so many years this almost seemed not to matter, as if their shared experience united them in a brotherhood that rendered personal preferences irrelevant. As if the look they exchanged in the kitchen of that house in Wales with Alison lying unconscious on the table and feathers and static electricity and the dark swirling around them forged some kind of link, a connection that bound their fates together and meant they would know each other anywhere.

It made sense while he was standing on the street in the rain, looking into Gwyn’s blue, blue eyes.

Standing alone in the living room of his flat - well appointed, tastefully modern, a bit sterile – it makes less sense. Roger has never tried to convince himself that whatever happened between them in Wales, their little reenactment of the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, didn’t happen. He lacks the imagination to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes, and he was too deeply shaken by the experience to mistake it for a hallucination or a game of make believe. But it feels isolated, confined to that place, separated from real life by an impenetrable barrier. He’s standing in a London flat, listening to the faint blare of traffic outside and looking at a television. People don’t create women from flowers and turn them into owls around here.

The connection now, that’s real; that means something even in London. He did spot Gwyn, after all. But how far does it go? How much could it matter in a pub? Isn’t he just setting himself up for an uncomfortable evening with an old almost-acquaintance he never liked very much?

He spends twenty minutes on Friday morning trying to pick a tie, and finally manages to convince himself he’s being ridiculous. All his ties fall into the category of “tasteful but boring”, and they were chosen to complement his suits, which fit the same criteria. If Gwyn draws any conclusion at all from Roger’s clothing, it will be that it cost rather more than his. Alienating, presumably, if Gwyn is anything like as chippy as he was nine years ago, but unavoidable: Roger doesn’t own a cheap suit.

And what does it matter anyway, what Gwyn thinks of him? He forces himself to choose a tie at random, put it on, and go to work.

* * *

It’s possible Gwyn put less thought into what he’s wearing than Roger did. His tie is a tepid green, less verdant than his valley. Roger rates its fabric ‘indeterminate’. Still, the suit isn’t bad, and if the class difference is troubling him he gives no indication of it.

Their supply of slightly barbed small talk is rapidly depleted. Every time there’s a lull in the conversation Roger considers broaching the main subject and then hesitates and draws back, throwing some other inanity into the gap. They might have gone on like this all evening, but near the bottom of his first pint Gwyn saves them by glancing sidelong at Roger and asking with studied casualness, “Hear much from Alison these days?”

Oh, thinks Roger. This is the reason Gwyn agreed to meet. Because a boy you hated at fifteen, that’s forgettable, that’s nothing – that’s probably every boy Gwyn knew, considering what Gwyn was like – but the unattainable girl you fell in love with, that’s another matter. Of course he wants to know what’s become of her.

The truth about Alison – and this is probably not the answer Gwyn was hoping to hear – is that she left for her year abroad and she never came back. Flat out refused, when her mother tried to put her foot down, and broke off contact with their parents for three months, although she kept writing to Roger. Margaret went into nuclear meltdown when she learned her precious doll of a daughter wasn’t coming home, but Alison had cleverly arranged things so that she would be out of range of any fallout. Roger was away at university and considered himself well clear of it, although he didn’t envy his father, left behind to cope with it all. He still hasn’t told them about Alison’s letters.

Ever since then Alison’s been gadding about Europe doing none of them are quite sure what. Living a glamorous lifestyle of Bohemian mystery, or possibly a less-than-glamorous lifestyle of waitressing and sleeping in hostels, although she always seems cheerful enough when she talks to him. Roger suspects his father, who loves Alison with the uncomplicated affection parents feel for children they adopted too late in life to bear any responsibility for their faults, secretly wires her money from time to time.

“She’s living in London now too and she’s single,” might have gone down better. “She married a stockbroker and they have a lovely house in Guildford,” might even have gone down better; at least that would put a lid on things once and for all. It’s hard to know what to make of Alison’s protracted European odyssey. Roger still doesn’t know what to make of it, and he’s been living with it for six years. 

Gwyn is pensive in the face of these revelations. He sits and runs a finger around the rim of his glass, which gives Roger the chance to discreetly assess what’s become of Gwyn. He's rather handsome, with those vivid eyes framed by thick lashes. He was even at fifteen, although he did a good job disguising it under a scowl and an unruly mop of hair and a sort of lumbering adolescent clumsiness. But he’s grown into himself now, and this adult Gwyn is comfortable in his own skin. It’s amazing how much of a difference that makes.

“Good for her,” Gwyn says finally. “And you? Any daring adventures to report?”

“You know me,” Roger says. “I always was the boring one.”

Gwyn flashes him a slightly vicious smile, which for some reason makes Roger’s stomach flip over. He loses his nerve again. They finish their drinks and leave without mentioning Blodeuwedd, or anything that happened in Wales.

* * *

Roger assumes he's seen the last of Gwyn. They parted without exchanging any contact information, and Roger’s of no more use now that his reservoir of information about Alison has been pumped dry. He meant it as a gesture of good faith – that, and he couldn’t very well say he didn’t know where his own stepsister was – but he was an idiot to give up so much without asking for anything in exchange. Gwyn’s surname, perhaps, since he can hardly turn up at Westminster Palace and ask if anyone knows a Gwyn.

Although it wasn’t just cowardice that made him hesitate. It’s also that he wasn’t sure what to ask for, just what it is he wants. Some acknowledgement of what happened in Wales, some sign that Gwyn remembers it. The solidarity of modern, rational man in the face of hostile supernatural forces beyond the ken of science, perhaps. Not that Gwyn was much for solidarity in the face of hostile supernatural forces even at the time. 

Alison was ill for days after Roger managed to turn her back to flowers. He might have defused the violence of Blodeuwedd’s coming, but Alison had been the conduit for more power than a human body could hold, and it burned through her like a fever. She was pale and listless, shaky when she tried to stand, struggled to keep food down. She spent most of her time asleep. Roger wandered numbly from room to room, unable to focus on anything or sit still for more than a few minutes. Gwyn disappeared entirely, although Roger didn’t know whether he’d followed his mother back to Aberystwyth or he simply made himself scarce.

The Bradleys had had enough, and left themselves as soon as the roads were clear. With the house in disrepair from the storm damage and no cook or housekeeper, it would have been less a holiday than an ordeal to stay on. He still remembers that long drive home, in the backseat with Alison watching her white face propped up against the window and trying to reassure himself that she was still breathing.

All of this meant that he and Gwyn never had another conversation after the storm of feathers in the kitchen, and in all honesty Roger never expected them to. Gwyn might eventually be able to forgive Alison her cowardice and Roger his cruelty, but could he ever forgive them for his own petty vindictiveness? He’d been prepared to let Alison die and destroy the valley rather than set aside his pride to help, and that sort of thing was hard to get over.

It’s easy to forgive your oppressors, with a little time and distance. That’s the usual kind of magnanimity, the kind everyone is taught to practice and admire – good old Christian charity. Forgiveness doled out with a heaping dose of benevolent condescension for the sad, pathetic bullies you’ve left behind. Why degrade yourself by holding a grudge when the very act of forgiving them proves the extent of your triumph?

But forgiving your victims – that takes a rare skill. How can you forget the face you saw in the mirror they held up to you, the things they showed you about yourself that you never wanted to know? Those crimes are harder to pardon. And Gwyn was never very good even at the ordinary kind of forgiveness.

That Roger found him once was a miracle, and he squandered it. He’s not expecting a second miracle.

But Gwyn calls him at work two weeks later and invites him out again.

Roger is so bewildered that the only thing he can think to ask is how Gwyn got his secretary to put the call through.

Gwyn laughs. “Told her I was calling from the Ministry of Defense. How does Monday at six suit you?”

All he can do is agree.

On the way out he asks his secretary if she managed to take down Gwyn’s last name. She hasn’t.

* * *

Right, Roger thinks, settling in at the table. You got your dossier on Alison. Now it’s my turn.

This time he won’t bottle it.

“Have you ever told anyone? About that summer, I mean, in the valley.”

Gwyn shakes his head. “No chance. They’d think I was crackers.”

Which answers the question about whether Gwyn remembers it, because if it was just the two of them fighting and Alison getting sick – that’s a lousy holiday, but nothing to make people question your sanity.

“I read it at university, your Mobby-gobby thingummy,” Roger says.

The Mabinogion. He can manage the pronunciation – perhaps not perfectly, but better than this. He’s mangling it deliberately, and he’s not sure whether he’s doing it to try to give the illusion of some distance on all this, or just to get a rise out of Gwyn.

Gwyn doesn’t correct him, just lifts an eyebrow in polite curiosity.

“I thought it might… I don’t know, make sense of everything. Or exorcise it. But there wasn’t much more there than what Halfbacon told us.”

“Dead words on a page.”

“Yeah.”

Gwyn leans forward, intrigued despite himself.

“You’re really caught up in this, aren’t you? But you hardly seemed to notice it while it was happening. I’d have expected it to affect you the least of any of us.”

“Of course it affected me,” says Roger. “I’m the one who died. Metaphorically speaking.”

Gwyn starts to laugh, stops. “You’re serious. But she was never after you. It was Alison at the center of it, and me, I nearly fell off the mountain, but when were you ever in any danger?”

“In the kitchen. When we had Ali laid out on the table and you wouldn’t help because you were too angry with us. I knew we had to complete the cycle before we could help her, that I had to stand there and let you hurt me. I gave myself over to you. You remember.”

“What’d you expect me to do?”

“I don’t know. Hit me, maybe.”

“I didn’t! I hardly even said anything.”

“I know. But you could have. I would have let you. I would have let you do anything. And we both knew it.”

“I wanted to kill you, all right. But it’s the twentieth century, man! You can’t go around chucking spears at people.”

“Bertram died. And the way your mum was swinging that poker around, and that storm, and the scratches under Ali’s skin – that was real, not playacting. I didn’t know what you would do.”

“No.” Gwyn looks thoughtful again.

“I appreciated your restraint.”

Gwyn smiles faintly. His tie is blue tonight. It brings out his eyes.

“Good thing I had it. You saved Alison, maybe all of us. I couldn’t do it.”

They stay for two drinks this time. Gwyn seems a little less guarded, and it worries Roger how much this pleases him.

* * *

It’s a crush. That’s the only explanation for why he can’t get Gwyn out of his head, why he’s anticipating their next meeting with such eagerness. Maybe it’s been there since he first met Gwyn on the street, masked under their shared trauma. That would account for his absurd indecisiveness over the ties.

Roger doesn’t mind being gay, although the need for discretion has left his love life fairly empty. Alison is the only one of his family and friends to know. He guessed, rightly, that the new Bohemian Ali would be accommodating, and he suspects it pleases her to know that he has a little private rebellion to accompany her enormous public one. Eventually it’s all going to end in a marriage to some nice respectable girl and 2.5 children, a prospect Roger anticipates with good-humored resignation, but he has a few years’ grace to enjoy his bachelorhood.

It is not supposed to end in Gwyn.

There’s no reason to believe Gwyn swings his way, and ample evidence he does not, namely Alison. Roger is usually good about not developing feelings for straight men. And of all the straight men in the world he could pick, a chippy Welsh yob seems like he should be very low on the list.

Now that he knows to look for it, it’s easier than ever to find ways in which Gwyn is attractive. His eyes, of course, how they light up when he thinks he’s onto something. His fingers when he gestures. The strong line of his jaw. The way his hair falls across his forehead.

Today Gwyn’s brought his own preoccupation. All these years while Roger has been worrying about what they did to themselves, Gwyn has been worrying about what they did to the valley.

“Damming it up just makes it stronger when it finally hits. But I wonder if there’s a way to drain it, like, to keep it from building up in the first place.”

Supernatural civil engineering projects are not Roger’s strong suit. He says just enough to keep Gwyn talking and then sits back and drinks him in, his animation, his gestures. Gwyn quite enjoys the sound of his own voice – Roger would blame the bad influence of his workplace, but as far as he can remember Gwyn was always like this – so the arrangement is satisfactory to everyone.

“Next Friday?” Gwyn asks, three hours later. “Unless you have a date.”

“Friday will be fine.”

Roger never has a date.

* * *

Friday dawns unseasonably warm and stays that way even after the sun sinks behind the buildings and leaves the streets in purple shadow. They sit outside, sipping their pints and watching the last lines of gold slip away from the upper stories. Gwyn slings his jacket over the back of his chair and rolls up his sleeves, revealing a span of well-muscled forearm with a scattering of dark hair. He must do something more than just sit behind a desk. Removals maybe, for extra cash.

His bare arms shouldn’t be so distracting. Roger tries not to look at them.

He doesn’t mean to go on about Blodeuwedd again – they’re getting as bad as old Halfbacon, the way they can’t seem to talk about anything else – but it’s their natural center of gravity. They’ve both been living with it for so long, with no one to talk to but themselves; that’s its own sort of battery, needing to be discharged. Inevitably the conversation circles back to that day in the kitchen.

“You had the right to ask me for something, to soften the blow,” Gwyn says, his eyes softer than Roger is accustomed to. “I would have given it to you. I would have had to give it. I’ve always wondered why you didn’t ask.”

“Well. My people have our ancient customs too, you know. Taking responsibility for our actions. Standing up and facing the consequences.”

He sees the flash in Gwyn’s eyes as he tries to decide whether or not this is a slur on the Welsh national character that demands a reprisal, but he’s a man now, not a boy of fifteen. He keeps a grip on his temper, although he lifts his chin in that proud way that makes Roger’s mouth go dry.

Then he grins.

“I owe you a favor then, don’t I? Do you have anything in mind?”

Oh, he does. Does he ever. He can’t say any of it.

Somehow Roger makes his excuses and manages to stagger down the street until he can find a corner to turn and collapse against the side of a building to catch his breath. His head is swimming. The sultry air doesn’t help; it makes everything seem thick and wavery, like he's underwater.

He can’t keep doing this. There’s a family holiday in Greece planned for next week, and it can’t come soon enough.

* * *

Santorini is a study in contrasts, dazzling whitewashed buildings against red and black cliffs and water Roger tries not to compare to the color of Gwyn’s eyes. Nice place for a photographer. And people leave you alone when you’re shooting film, there’s that too.

On the second day Alison appears trailing her latest European conquest, a Danish engineering student named Neils she met hiking in the Alps. He speaks excellent English but nonetheless carefully enunciates each syllable of her name, “A-li-son”, as if the word is holy. Like most of her boyfriends he has dark hair and blue eyes, which is another topic they don’t talk about. Neils is quietly ingratiating to Margaret, chummy with Clive and solicitous of Alison. Alison seems to like him well enough, but Roger senses he is an impermanent fixture and wonders if he knows.

Lunch on the fourth day consists of mussels in some sort of tomato concoction. It tastes fine, but afterwards everyone has to go back to their rooms and lie down except for Alison, who hates shellfish and ordered a salad, and Roger, who has a stomach of cast iron. She suggests they take a hike along the cliffs while the others recover. They pick their way over the tumbled scoria for a while in companionable silence, and then settle on a flat block of stone for a breather.

He’s been debating whether or not to tell her about Gwyn, but this opportunity, at a safe remove from their parents and the pleasant but clingy Neils, seems too good to pass up.

“You’ll never guess who I ran into in Westminster. I saw Gwyn – he works for Parliament now, would you believe it?”

Alison does not ask which Gwyn. This points to a slightly less embarrassing explanation for the whole Gwyn No-Surname business, because realistically, how many Gwyns do they know?

She says nothing and looks out to sea for a while, her hair blowing about her face and her skirt billowing and snapping against her legs in the wind. Her finger idly traces a figure on the sun-drenched rock, and Roger knows without looking that it’s the arched brow and the two dot eyes of the owlman’s face from Gwyn’s slate necklace. He’s been finding them for years now, sketched in the fog on car windows, kicked into the gravel of the drive. Whenever Alison’s attention drifts this is where her mind goes, like a wheel slipping into a buried rut on an old road.

There is a block of wood at the natural history museum in Oxford which shows the delicate branching patterns called Lichtenberg figures, mapping out the path of a lightning strike in charred wood. It’s something a little like that, maybe: a path seared into her mind when the power grounded itself. The ordeal left no mark on Alison’s body – the red scratches beneath her skin were just pink lines on the second day, healed completely by the next – only this pattern, revealed by her distraction.

Something else they never talk about.

“I would,” Alison says eventually, after Roger has completely forgotten the question. “There was a drive in him, an energy. He couldn’t channel it back then, it just sort of sprayed everywhere, but if he could… He wanted to get out so badly, and to help the people there. It makes sense.”

“We’ve gone for a drink a few times,” Roger says.

She turns to him, and there’s a sort of hunger in her face.

“Tell me about him.”

“Tell you what?”

“How he is! What he’s like. Tell me everything.”

So he does, everything he can think of. Four evenings – there’s not much to relate.

When he’s finished there’s a slight smile playing about her lips.

“You know, if I didn’t know better…”

“What?”

“I’d almost think you fancied him, the way you talk about him.”

Roger winces. He didn’t realize he was so transparent. 

She sees him blush and grins. “You do, don’t you?”

“Don’t laugh. It’s tragic! He likes girls! Obviously.”

“Oh God, Roger, did you fancy him back then? Were you _jealous?_ Is that why you were so horrid? Because you’re not usually like that, not so bad as you were then.”

He has his knees up; he’s been resting his elbows on them. At this he buries his face in his arms.

“I don’t know!” he moans, muffled.

He doesn’t. Back then he hadn’t realized, or hadn’t yet admitted to himself, which way his predilections ran. But Gwyn always had that intensity, didn’t he? Even as a scruffy, sullen teenager, there was something about him that caught your attention.

What was it that Halfbacon said? She will use what she finds.

Roger’s been caught in this trap from the beginning.

“This isn’t fair.”

Alison kicks his shoe gently.

“Have you asked him?”

“Asked him?”

“If it’s only girls he likes.”

“You can’t just come out and ask people that! You’d get punched. Or arrested.”

“Well, you find out somehow, don’t you? However you do it, then.”

He’s never had much patience for that sort of subtle semaphore, or the inclination to go to the sort of places where it isn’t necessary. It’s one of the reasons for his barren love life. But Alison is nattering on regardless.

“I think you should. Because you say you’re not friends, and if you’re not friends– You’re going out together an awful lot, for not-friends.”

“They’re not _dates_.” And then, “Supposing they were… you wouldn’t mind?”

She laughs.

“You goose! Oh Roger, you’re sweet to ask, but it’s not like that.”

“It just seems to me you have a prior claim.”

She shakes her head.

“I do love him. He set me free. If it weren’t for him I would have been so unhappy; I’d have gone through my whole life trapped, never even seeing the bars of the cage. He made me see them. And once I could see them I could find the door. But I can’t be with him. Not like that, not like he wanted. He’s so strong-willed– he and Mummy kept pulling at me, like I was taffy and they were trying to stretch me into the shape they thought was right. If I’d gone with him it would just have been another cage in the end.

“I do want to see him again someday. When I’m older, when I’m more sure of what I want and who I am and he can’t pull me out of shape anymore. But not yet. You should ask him, Roger. Maybe he’ll set you free too.”

She closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun, her hair streaming back in the wind. For a moment he can see it in her, that liberty.

He lies back on the warm red rock and snaps a photo.

* * *

Alison’s advice on matters other than tracing things off plates is generally sound, and besides, the current situation is unsustainable. You can’t be mates with someone who makes you go weak at the knees every time they roll up their sleeves. Either the crush goes or Roger does.

So, proposition him– why not?

Best case scenario: Gwyn takes him to bed. Most likely case: the signal bounces off his thick Welsh head and Roger knows it’s hopeless. Worst case: Gwyn punches him in the face and they never speak again, which is probably how this relationship is going to end anyway, sooner or later. It seems worth the gamble.

He may not have his stepsister’s carefully cultivated boldness, but he’s not such a coward he can’t do this. He’s given Gwyn the chance to do worse to him before.

On their next night out, after they’ve finished their drinks, he wiggles his eyebrows just enough that Gwyn can laugh it off as a joke and says,

“Come back to my place and see my photos?”

There’s an awful moment when everything hangs in the air and Roger feels like he can’t breathe, and then Gwyn smiles, a glint in his eye.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

* * *

Roger ushers Gwyn into his flat with a wave of his hand.

Gwyn whistles, spins around on his heels to get a better look at the place. “This _is_ nice. Daddy’s money?”

“My money. Daddy’s firm, so I suppose you’d say it’s the same–” Roger stops. Gwyn isn’t listening to him anymore, because his attention has been entirely captured by the photographs hung on the wall.

Roger has a few of his best shots up, a diagonal line running down the wall to the kitchen. Halfway down he’s hung that photograph of Alison from Santorini, with her eyes closed and her face tilted up to the sun. It’s not a very interesting piece compositionally, but it’s a good picture of her and he likes how it caught the mood.

“She looks happy,” Gwyn says. “Looser, somehow. Like there’s a burden lifted from her. She never looked like that in Wales.”

You knew her two weeks, Roger thinks. What would you know about it? But he’s right.

“She was different after that summer. I think when we, um, completed the circuit we released something in her. A constraint. So she could go back to being flowers on the mountain, the way she was always meant to be.”

“All that power flowing through her. Like a firehose, isn’t it? Of course it would take everything else with it, blast it right off. Blasted us right off too, me and her mam.”

Gwyn’s shoulders slump. For a moment he looks like the gangling fifteen-year-old again.

“I wish I could say it was what I wanted for her, but that wouldn’t be honest. I’m glad, though. For her. And that all this was some good to someone.’’

“It still could be,” Roger says. “To us.”

Gwyn’s eyes are very blue. Roger reaches for his hand.

“Come stick a spear in me?”

“You’re not half as funny as you think you are,” Gwyn says, but he follows Roger into the bedroom.


End file.
